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hypnosec writes "Canonical has a countdown on its site that indicates a possible tablet announcement tomorrow. With the Ubuntu Touch developer preview launching this week, the announcement about a tablet or at least an operating system for a tablet from Canonical has, it seems, taken a backseat. From the countdown that reads "Tick, tock, tablet time!" it is evident that Canonical is going to make some announcement about tablets tomorrow."

Since the Ubuntu tablet will not have 'keys' in a physical sense; being a largely featureless slab of glass on the front just like everything else on the market, Canonical is pleased and proud to announce that 'keystrokes' will not be transmitted directly to valued advertising partners!

...and will we want it to? I wasn't aware of Debian having resonable touch support (but TBH, I really don't know). How are the specs? How open is the hardware? Assuming reasonable specs, and open hardware drivers (and that's assuming a LOT), I'd like to see KDE Plasma Active on it.

I'd also like to see if Canonical can produce a usable tablet. I'm not a huge fan of Unity, but I'm willing to be impressed if they can make something impressive. Ball's in your court, Canonical.

I hope they will come up with some reason for the consumer to go out and buy an Ubuntu tablet. As things are, the competition is pretty strong. Android and iOS have all bases covered, with hundreds of thousands of applications, and with several years on the market, and with millions of deployed devices, and with the user base trained.

Sight unseen, I'd say that an Ubuntu tablet may not even win against a Windows 8 tablet. It still may be that Ubuntu people have some bright idea that hasn't occurred to Apple and Google, but that is not very likely. Price-wise, they are competing with a free OS (Android) that Google spends millions on in R&D, and with finished tablets that can be had for under $100.

That's true if we think of the market in terms of dollars, everyone who's prepared to pay $499 for a tablet already owns one. If we look at the market in terms of number of users and potential users I think we'll find that more than 95% of everyone in the world does not yet own a tablet. Even if we limit ourselves to the 2.5 billion or so people who have a high enough income that they could potentially invest in a cheap tablet I bet more than 2 billion of them don't yet own one. All those people have yet to be trained to use iOS or Android on a tablet, and most of them probably don't even own a smartphone yet.

Mark Shuttleworth has said that they're primarily targeting consumers in the developing world and corporations/organizations in the developed world, which sounds like a viable plan to me if they can execute it. My doubts revolve around Canonical's ability to deliver a decent version of their OS (both from a consumer perspective and from an app developer perspective) in a timely manner, before the market has been completely saturated by cheap Android tablets and perhaps a cheap version of the iPad. I think it's more likely that it will take them several years to get to where the OS is competitive with Android and by then it will surely be too late.

Mark Shuttleworth has said that they're primarily targeting consumers in the developing world and corporations/organizations in the developed world

Android is free. The $99 that you pay for a low end tablet is all going to the manufacturer, to pay for the hardware. How will a different and less popular OS make it cheaper? What can you offer in UNIX/Linux that you cannot offer on Android? Why would you build a tablet application for Unity (using what?) and target hundreds of customers if you can build an A

In the low end market it's not the price of the OS that determines which phone is cheaper, it's how lightweight the OS plus apps are. If you can make an OS that runs better than the competition on last year's mid-range hardware you can deliver a fast and modern experience at a lower price. If you could deliver something as compelling as the Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10 experiences (albeit with lower resolution displays) on last year's hardware you could begin to gain market shares in the low end market.

Mark Shuttleworth has said that they're primarily targeting consumers in the developing world and corporations/organizations in the developed world, which sounds like a viable plan to me if they can execute it.

What part of that sounds like viable? To me it sounds like OLPC for tablets, except they think to make a profit on it. Is there any track record of a "poor man's device" succeeding in computers or small electronics? I'm thinking razor thin margins and extreme need for volume to drive unit price down, exactly what a large incumbent industry is made for like the dumb phones Nokia has been pounding out billions of. This is a lot more on the hardware side, a huge Android manufacturer thinking "If I order the ch

The extent to which they lock it down and make a Canonical Store the sole vehicle for loading QML app$ onto the device will determine its appeal.

As long as it's a standard ARM-based distro that one can run, say, GIMP and emacs under E17 (via external inputs and display) then everyone should be happy. But if it's akin to Windows RT, where only store-purchased apps can run then it's appeal is limited.

The most exciting thing about an Ubuntu tablet would be if it means open source drivers for all the hardware. A reference tablet that anyone can install OSS onto would be great for tinkerers. (Or is the Nexus 7 already this?)

Given a Ubuntu tablet uses more or less the same kernel and device driver framework (minor revisions aside, they're licensed in exactly the same way) as Android, this is only really going to be true to the degree that it's true of Android.

but it's another thing to have an interface that will work on it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't seen a style blueprint for ubuntu phones/tablets interface yet, only that it'll run on QT. Personally, I'd like a full gnu/linux stack on a phone (and I use the N900), but I just don't see how Canonical are going to compress the years of tinkering done by apple, android and maemo to make a consistent touch-friendly interface that works on a small device. I'm ready to be surprised, but I think most of us are going to be disappointed.

I think Jolla looks promising, although they've a lot to prove, and at the moment there is way more hype and vapour than substance.

it is not trivial if you start with Unity, it leaves shitsta^h^h^h^h^h^h artifacts that screw up better desktops. since they're focusing on their tabletly UI and not better desktops, better to change the underlying distro too.

Here I was hoping that it meant they were finally going to take their medication, and cure themselves of the disease that has given us Unity, Shopping Lens and other mistakes of the last couple of years.

Had you bothered to go actually look at the countdown timer, you would have seen the words "Tick, tock, tablet time!" in large print right there in front of your face, and you would have known to end the title of your summary with a period instead of a question mark, and avoided the whole "let me go make myself look like an ass on Slashdot" thing.

I have mod points, but dude you are a bonafide coward! Why are they giving Linux a bad name? I use Ubuntu all the time, and if anything they are making Linux usable. If you don't like that, fine, don't like it. Use another distribution. What is wonderful about Linux is that you don't have to like Ubuntu, because there is CHOICE! Think about that! Choice! Do we have choice with OSX? Windows? NO, NO and NO!

Not nobody. My firefox accepts cookies and run scripts only if they're whitelisted, precisely to defeat google analytics (and a few others). I use gmail (and nothing but gmail) in Chrome, and otherwise stay logged out of google. If I really need to go to a website with a malware-capable browser, I use a guest account.

Mint has a pretty decent income, they bring in thousands every month and publish their incomes and amounts on their website. Mint is financially supported and probably wouldn't exist if it were not a commercial distribution.

When that time comes, I would hope they do what Ubuntu started to do and ask for donations. I think it would have worked pretty well for Canonical if they hadn't killed any good will with the Amazon crap. I'd actually be quite interested which approach got them more money. Long term, I would think donations would win out.

I have mod points, but dude you are a bonafide coward! Why are they giving Linux a bad name? I use Ubuntu all the time, and if anything they are making Linux usable. If you don't like that, fine, don't like it. Use another distribution. What is wonderful about Linux is that you don't have to like Ubuntu, because there is CHOICE! Think about that! Choice! Do we have choice with OSX? Windows? NO, NO and NO!

Sure there is choice, I can for example abandon OS X for Windows OR Linux (Hint: That's two choices). There is a world outside Linux-land there is a world outside Wiindows-land and there is a world outside OS X land and you are allowed to travel between them.

To be honest, I'm not much of a fan of Ubuntu anymore and that for many of the standard reasons cited here on Slashdot. That being said, I do not understand the ire which comes out every time anything is posted about Ubuntu. I dislike Shuttleworth as much as the next guy, and I think they deserve criticism for the recent privacy issues, but lately it seems like they receive the sort of comments here that used to include "M$". I keep waiting for someone to start complaining about anonial.* I guess it just doesn't look as cool.

*(Ah. I see. When I clicked preview, I discovered that the cent signs I used for Canonical don't display on Slashdot. Having tried to use other unicode characters, I should have known better. That explains why people who enjoy making a sport of hating Ubuntu haven't used it.)

Whatever Shuttleworth does now, however shitty Unity is right now, I'll always remember my amazement in winter 2005 when I first tried Hoary Live CD.That was the first Linux i tried where sound/network worked out of the box.This guy invested millions in this cool project, and I had a blast using Ubuntu Desktop/Server/JeOS during many years.Linux Mint wouldn't be exist without Ubuntu.

There's a lot of Unity hate going on, and I admit, when it first launched it was an utter failure. You couldn't resize the icon bar, it was missing a lot of useful keyboard shortcuts, searching for a program didn't allow you to directly launch with the keyboard and it was otherwise just generally unusable. I decided to give it another shot recently, however, and it's come a long way, even matured into a fully usable and efficient UI. I can auto-hide the iconbar, resize it, and the search box is fantastic! I

That being said, I do not understand the ire which comes out every time anything is posted about Ubuntu.

I think the fear (one which I share) is over the mainstreaming of Linux.

Right now if you want to make your software available on Linux you need to either support many platforms, or more ideally just offer a source tarball. You get your applications from your distro.

If one Linux distro really takes off then you might find more and more applications that are binary-only linked against the libraries that particular distro uses. Suddenly you end up with less choice, because many parties would rather do it tha

I think that if that were going to happen, it would have by now. Debian would have taken over, or Ubuntu, or Red Hat. But, instead, the success of each has had a ripple effect, as each works to imitate and/or provide alternatives to whatever bells and whistles are working for one of them this week. In other words, the GPL has provided a level playing field for competition, and there's no reason to think it won't continue to do so. The success of any given distro can't be entirely de-linked from the success

I think that if that were going to happen, it would have by now. Debian would have taken over, or Ubuntu, or Red Hat. But, instead, the success of each has had a ripple effect, as each works to imitate and/or provide alternatives to whatever bells and whistles are working for one of them this week.

Yup. My concern was more with the whole "don't abandon Ubuntu - at least they're popularizing linux" bit. I'm not sure I want to see any one distro get a huge majority of the install base. In my mind a distro being popular is the best reason not to use it - it keeps the ecosystem healthy.

Ubuntu put a useless GUI on the main distribution, out-pacing even Microsoft Windows 8 in the race to the bottom, and also invasive crapware adware spyware. They put untested bleeding edge crap into their works.

Basically, all those neckbeards have spend untold manhours promoting Ubuntu in forums and real life (often with gross exaggerations and by not explaining to the unsuspecting users what this 'Ubuntu' or 'Linux' thing is), but now that Ubuntu is not one of "their" OSes anymore, they feel cheated.
But the really funny thing would be if Ubuntu wins (aka acheives something like 10% marketshare). The wrong Linux horse will have won the race (well, the wrong Linux horse has already won the race, it's called Andro

This is completely true. Ubuntu should not be a vanity project and Mark Shuttleworth should not have to pay out of his own pocket to keep it relevant. Ubuntu needs to find ways to make consistent cashflow while remaining free-to-use.

All of this snidery is coming from people who don't understand that not everyone want to hand compile their own OS and don't think Richard Stallman is the Second Coming.

And the mentioning of Slackware just goes to show that Ubuntu is being treated like a pariah. Slackware is out

All of this snidery is coming from people who don't understand that not everyone want to hand compile their own OS and don't think Richard Stallman is the Second Coming.

It isn't that they don't understand - it is that they don't care. They also don't care if Linux ever gains market share or becomes self-funding. They care that it works for them, and for others like them.

The challenge will be if Ubuntu actually makes it more practical to make binary-only software/drivers/etc for Linux that it may become harder to run pure open-source, as many companies that release driver source now might stop doing so. That could lead to a lot of forking and re-inventing the wheel, and

"If it runs Unity then run for the hills. Seriously, how many users did they lose with that ugliness?"

All the users who didn't know how easy it is to have more than one Desktop Environment on Linux

Yes, I know you can run other Desktop Environments and have used multiple ones. But the point is that the poor decision making and general direction of the project made me look for another distro that better matched what I wanted.